We came to annihilate you; Death to the
Arabs; Kahane was right; No tolerance, we came to liquidate. This is a
selection of graffiti Israeli soldiers left on the walls of
Palestinians' homes in Gaza, which they turned into bivouacs and firing
positions during Operation Cast Lead. Here and there, a soldier
scribbled a line of mock poetry or biblical quote in the same sentiment.
There were also curses on the Prophet Mohammed and Hamas leader Ismail
Haniyeh, along with shift schedules and favorite soccer teams.

When the homes' owners returned, they
usually found widespread devastation - whether from the first shells the
Israel Defense Forces fired to chase away the inhabitants, or from
break-ins and the destruction of furniture, clothing, walls, computers
and appliances. Frequently the breached homes remained standing in a
neighborhood whose other houses were turned into rubble by bulldozers.
The residents also found the trash the soldiers left behind.

In Israel, research institutes count every
abusive slogan scrawled on Jewish cemeteries abroad and document every
problematic article, to monitor the upsurge in anti-Semitism. The media
attributes importance to every piece of graffiti against assassinated
prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. But the everyday racism - both
institutionalized and popular, declarative and practical - against the
Arabs of Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank are usually
cautiously and frugally covered.

No wonder the Hebrew graffiti, whose
writers were also destructive, on walls in the heart of Palestinian
neighborhoods were not picked up by Israeli antennae, always so
sensitive to racism against Jews.

The military spokespeople could dismiss
the reports and testimony of the killing of many civilians at short or
long range as fabricated or manipulative, or could answer generally that
the terrorists were responsible because they were hiding nearby. Israeli
society, from whose view Cast Lead has been buried in a closed archive,
is always ready for any trick to explain how righteous and morally
superior its army is.

But the photographic evidence of the
Hebrew graffiti is hard to deny or call fabricated; all the more so when
it appears alongside the names of army units and individual soldiers.
Indeed, the military spokesman said the graffiti contravenes the values
of the IDF, and the IDF views it gravely.

Not all the soldiers wrote graffiti, but
the comrades and commanders of those who did neither stopped them nor
erased what they scrawled. So this is where we can praise the soldiers'
sincerity and integrity. They felt free to write what they did because
they - like the pilots and operators of the missile-bearing drones -
knew they had received from their government and commanders a free hand
to attack a civilian population. Why then should there be a problem with
the words they chose? What they wrote on the walls reflects their
understanding of the spirit of their mission.

Unlike the older commanders, who are
permitted to speak to certain journalists acceptable to the army, and
who recite carefully what the IDF's legal advisers and the State
Prosecutor's Office tell them to say, the writers of the graffiti -
soldiers in the regular army who grew up with the occupation and
Israel's military superiority - have not yet understood that the world
makes more than weapons. It also makes laws, rules and human norms.

Their commanders permitted them to
contravene norms they are obviously unaware of. Unlike those who
formulate the IDF Spokesman's responses, the young, unsophisticated
soldiers are inexperienced at covering up the army's actions and its
mission, their mission, with words that blur the truth.